Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [79]
He was remembering his doubts of the night before, when the thought that life and death might be two sides of a door seemed to mock his warrior’s craft. Now those doubts were gone. He had seen what his enemy did to their own slaves, seen how they treated prisoners. These were the same beings who held the siege of Cengarn. If the city fell to them? He refused to let himself imagine it possible. This was what his long life of war had led him to, as straight as the flight of an arrow, that he and other men like him should stand between the city and this army. As they flew, following the long track across the plateau, he watched the sun sink in a sea of blood.
That night, he made a fire for their camp, just for the light against the dark. When he searched through his gear, he found one last scrap of flatbread, barely two mouthfuls, but he’d ridden hungry before. He knelt close to the fire and fed it twigs, a few at a time, till he could lay in the dead branches he’d found.
“I can fly at night,” Arzosah said, “if you want to push on for this Lin Serr place.”
“They shut it up at sunset, and besides, for all we know, it’s besieged.”
“Or fallen.”
“Nah, nah, nah, not Lin Serr. They could hold off a siege for a hundred years if they had to. You’ll see what I mean when we reach it. Huh, though, a thought just dawned on me. Should I be having this fire? It’s like a beacon, truly, if there are some roaming squads around.”
“I would have smelled them. Rhodry, an odd thing! I begin to think that they’re all gone. The Horsekin, I mean. We haven’t seen a thing move, and I’ve smelled naught.”
“Well, they arrived up here by dweomer, didn’t they? Mayhap they’ve left the same cursed way.”
Since the fire had taken, he moved back and sat cross-legged in the dirt to watch it burn. Arzosah sighed and rested her head on her paws.
“I’m hungry,” she announced. “We’ve flown a long way since I ate that horse.”
“I’m hungry, too, but we can ignore it.”
“You are so mean, Dragonmaster!”
“What I’ve seen today would make any man mean. Ye gods, I keep remembering other wars I’ve fought. Petty things, all of them, or so they seem now, compared to this.”
She raised a doubting eye-ridge.
“Well, they were,” he went on. “Some arrogant lord’s feud, mostly, men wrangling over who’d get the taxes from a bridge, or who’d be elevated in rank, or swearing vengeance for some slight or another. Stupid things, stupid, stupid things, though, you know, I never would have called them that before.”
“Were lots of men killed in them?”
“They were. Too many.”
“Well, you don’t need to look so sad. The blame of it isn’t yours.”
“Of course not. And I never felt this way back then, when I was riding the wars, I mean.” He shook his head, baffled. His life had never allowed him much time for thinking, after all, especially of this abstract sort. “It was seeing those farmers, somehow, that made me realize. Now this is a war worth riding.”
“Vengeance, you mean.”
“That, too. But I meant, to keep it from happening to anyone else. Ye gods, vengeance won’t be bringing them back to life, will it?”
Arzosah laughed in a long thunder.
“I never thought I’d hear an elven man say such a thing,” she said. “Amazing.”
“Don’t be snide! You’re after a vengeance of your own.”
“Of course, but I know I’m doing it for me, not for my poor dearest mate. You people always seem to think the dead will be pleased because you’re avenging them. They won’t, you know. They can’t be. They’re dead.”
Rhodry started to snap at her, realized that he had nothing to say, and contented himself with putting another branch on the fire. Although the dragon fell asleep soon after, he stayed staring at the flames until he ran out of wood, and his mind was leaping this way and that just like the fire, with strange thoughts forming and rising, only to fall again. When at last he slept, he dreamt of Jill, who spoke